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Is Stephen King a great writer?

He’s one of the best-selling authors of all time but his work doesn’t
get much respect from the literary establishment. Jane Ciabattari asks
if that’s fair.

Stephen King has had an uncanny ability to hit the commercial
bull’s-eye from the beginning of his career. In the 40 years since his
first novel, Carrie, he has published more than 50 books, all of them
international best sellers. Shortly after its release, Carrie was turned
into a blood-drenched film by Brian De Palma. And in 1977 King’s novel
The Shining, set in a wintry ski resort and featuring a paranormal child
and a maniacal father, further showcased his unparalleled gift for
psychological terror. When Stanley Kubrick turned that novel into a film
in 1980, the Stephen King industry was born. There are now more than
100 films and TV programmes based on his work, and he shows no signs of
slowing down – not with his legions of fans, hungry for more.

But
the respect of the literary establishment has always eluded King. For
years, the question of whether he was a serious writer was answered by a
quick tabulation of book sales, film deals, income and sheer volume of
output, which added up to a resounding ‘no’. Commercial triumph did not
equal literary value. Being a best seller was anathema. (Tell that to
21st-Century authors like Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Flanagan and Donna
Tartt, who have translated literary laurels into sales.)

Sissy Spacek earned an Oscar nomination
for Carrie – a film that brought both the actor and Stephen King to wide
attention (Alamy)

From the beginning, King was dismissed as a
‘genre writer’. But really, he is polymorphous. In addition to horror,
science fiction and fantasy novels, he has written historical fiction
(his recent 11/22/63, in which a man travels back in time to kill Lee
Harvey Oswald, won a Los Angeles Times book award and was a New York
Times ‘top ten of the year’ pick), Westerns and literary short stories,
which he describes as “the way I affirm, at least to myself, the fact
that I haven't sold out”.

The curse of popularity

King
has always been clear about the inspiration he has drawn from respected
literary forebears. His short story The Man in the Black Suit, an
homage to Hawthorne about a man who meets the devil on a walk through
the woods, won an O Henry award after being published in The New Yorker.
His ongoing connection with and affinity to Edgar Allen Poe was first
made explicit with his 1975 version of The Tell Tale Heart, retitled Old
Dude’s Ticker. HP Lovecraft inspired his 1987 science fiction novel The
Tommyknockers, and King’s work also has similarities with the work of
inventive literary authors: George Saunders, Karen Russell, Karen Joy
Fowler, Michael Chabon, to name a few who blur genre boundaries, dabble
in fantasy and adopt the conventions of horror and fantasy without
losing respect.

But does any of this really mean we should take
King seriously? The question is sure to rise again in November with the
publication of Revival, a ‘pact with the Devil’ novel featuring a New
England-born rocker with addiction issues and yet another diabolical
reverend. My answer is a conditional ‘yes’. He keeps millions of
readers engaged at a crucial time in the world of books, as technology
continues to transform reading in unpredictable ways. King has been one
of the first to experiment with new technologies, coming up with online
serial novels and the first downloadable e-book, Riding the Bullet.

At
his best, King is a masterful storyteller. He is able to create worlds
infused with a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. He writes of
familiar family crises, fears of the unknown and the yearning to belong.
At a time when we are barraged with horrifying events – beheadings,
Ebola, serial killers, plane crashes, police shootings, mass murders,
cyberbullying – his visceral stories provide a catharsis, sometimes even
a sense of order. Some victims can be avenged in fiction, if not in
life. King may simplify, but he does it without contempt for his
characters or readers. He may write too much, but his best work endures.
He may be, at times, sophomoric, but he also can be superbly Gothic.

Canon fodder?

I
put the question of King’s literary merit to Yale University’s Harold
Bloom, the legendary critic and author of The Western Canon. Bloom
issued a stinging rebuke of King in 2003, when King was given the US
National Book Foundation’s annual award for ‘distinguished contribution
to American letters’. Bloom called the honour “another low in the
shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King
in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too
kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an
immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence,
paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Is it possible Harold
Bloom might have changed his mind over the last tumultuous decade? It
seems not. “Stephen King is beneath the notice of any serious reader who
has experienced Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Faulkner and all the other
masters of the novel,” Bloom tells me.

Stephen King at a book signing in Paris for his novel Doctor Sleep, a follow-up to The Shining (Getty Images)

From the other side of the genre divide, I posed
the question to the prolific horror writer Peter Straub. Straub has a
shelf full of Bram Stoker awards and has edited multiple anthologies,
including Poe's Children and the Library of America edition of HP
Lovecraft's Tales; he collaborated with King on The Talisman (1984) and
its 2001 sequel Black House. “It's an odd question,”
says Straub, who ranks King with Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Raymond
Chandler, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle. "In a way, it has been asked
about him almost since he began publishing. In the late ‘70s, the
question was really rhetorical, because the answer was understood to be
‘no’. A writer with such immediate access to the imagination of so many
readers, a lot of them unsophisticated, could not presume to
seriousness.

Now, his readership is even larger and more inclusive and
the similarities between King and Dickens, always visible to those who
cared for King's work, have become all but unavoidable. Both are
novelists of vast popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are
beloved writers with a pronounced taste for the morbid and grotesque,
both display a deep interest in the underclass.”

In his time,
Dickens was reviled by high-brow contemporaries, including George Eliot,
who attacked him for “enjoying an extravagantly high reputation” and
“being rewarded for his labours, both in purse and in credit, at an
extravagantly high rate.” Eliot posed the same question that dogs
Stephen King: “Who, it may be asked, takes Mr Dickens seriously? Is it
not foolish to estimate his melodramatic and sentimental stock-in-trade
gravely?” Dickens has stood the test of time. Today no-one disputes his
worth. The best of Stephen King’s work is has become so embedded in the
culture I suspect he faces a similar fate.